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Unity Debacle Sets Back Ubuntu On The ARM Desktop

09-11-2012, 02:50 PM

Phoronix: Unity Debacle Sets Back Ubuntu On The ARM Desktop

With Unity 2D being abandoned and only providing Unity + Compiz in Ubuntu 12.10 as the default desktop, the out-of-the-box experience for low-powered ARM hardware on the stock Ubuntu desktop is a mess...

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Personally it would be far easier if Ubuntu for ARM would either come with XFCE or classic Gnome as opposed to Unity. With all the trouble involved with unity on top of the need for dedicated 3D acceleration just for a basic desktop it's pointless. ARM SoCs have limited resources to begin with and assuming they did have open source and working 3D drivers it would still be a burden on the SoC just to drive a desktop let alone whatever other process you have running or wish to run. Canonical may be making strides in supporting ARM but as for making it a useful desktop just package it without Unity and give the option during install for either classic Gnome or XFCE.

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looks like Canonical don't have resources to rewrite Unity (+ they don't even think to abandon compiz)

I don't mind that they don't have resources to maintain both. My point was that if they started with Qt then they wouldn't have needed to maintain both a GTK and Qt version. A Qt version of Unity would do everything that the GTK version can plus work well on systems without acceleration such as some ARM systems.

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I guess this is a debacle because users can't just boot the current LTS version and run Unity2D.

Ohhhhhh... waaaaaaaaait.

But to be serious, this is Canonical's modus operandi: If you don't put the new stuff out there in each non-LTS version, warts and all, no one will work on putting together those last few components needed to make the entire system better. Remember the first release with Unity? More of the same. Microsoft does the same - they just charge for theirs.

For the vast majority of us, where Unity3D is running great... this is no issue. For everyone else, it'll get fixed - quick.